Wearing turbans in the more paranoid parts of the US today could get you into trouble, so it is ironic to read a US State Department memo from 1945 about how “every Indian” coming to the country should wear a turban, even if he didn’t regularly wear one, during the first weeks of “his stay in any community”.

This was to show he was Indian, not African-American, and hence should not suffer the discriminations that the latter group had to endure.

The combination of helpful hint, easy use of stereotype and acceptance of racial discrimination is a telling glimpse into the attitudes of that era — and that’s not even getting into the assumption that, as Ross Bassett notes, “only men would be coming”.

The Tech-savvy Indian This is just one of many fascinating details in Bassett’s new book The Technological Indian, which could be described as a study of how the image of the Indian techie was created. Bassett is an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University and a specialist in the history of technology.

But he first trained and worked as an engineer, alongside many colleagues of Indian origin. This is now so common as to have become a cliché, with television shows like The Big BangTheory showing techsavvy Indians. But in high school, Bassett had been interested in Gandhi and read his writings and knew how he was usually shown as deeply opposed to modern technology.

How did Gandhi’s India also create the Indian techie? This is a question India often ignores, as when prime ministers from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi have simultaneously praised Gandhian values while promoting an anti-Gandhian vision of industrialised India. Or, it is used opportunistically by the emigration-minded as a justification for leaving a country they argue is eternally bound to Gandhi’s agrarian, anti-modern mindset.

Bassett found that the issue was more complex. He focused his research on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has a rich database of student information, thanks to its early founding in 1861, and high reputation, which made it a magnet for technology seekers from around the world. He expected to find many Indian students from the post-Independence era, but what surprised him was to find at least 100 who received MIT degrees before 1947.

Even more surprising, many had links to Gandhi. A disproportionate number came from Saurashtra, like Gandhi, and many were inspired by or received assistance from a close friend of Gandhi’s, a man sometimes seen as his representative in the area. This was Devchand Parekh, born two years after Gandhi, whose father was a minister in a local state, just as Gandhi’s father had been.

Like Gandhi, Parekh went to the UK to become a lawyer, though at Cambridge rather than London. And it was at Cambridge in 1893 that he had a formative encounter with the economistAlfred Marshall, who told him frankly that young Indians like him should not be coming to the UK to become lawyers; “instead they should go to America — specifically to MIT — to study engineering and then return to India to set up industries that would improve the Indian standard of living”.

This was something several Indian leaders, specifically in western India, were also advocating. Bassett starts his book with an account of a meeting held in Pune in 1884 where MM Kunte, headmaster of the Poona High School, had called on Indians to learn “the art of mechanisation” which “has become a Kalpavriksha”, the wish-granting tree that would help India progress from its current sad state. It is an appeal that sounds much like PM Modi’s recent call to Make in India.

As with the PM’s regular evocations of India’s past glories, 19th century advocates of progress pointed to the subcontinent’s past mastery of technologies like weaving which had first brought foreigners to India to trade, but then unfortunately to conquer and control the means of production. Worse, with the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the West, foreign rulers actively destroyed India’s abilities to keep the country in a passive, exploitable agrarian condition. Learning technology was a nationalist imperative.

MIT ConnectBut the British didn’t encourage this. At best, they allowed learning low-level skills to help implement projects that benefitted the colonial state, but even this was not a priority. The viceroy, Lord Curzon, could sanction major funds for the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, but disparaged plans to set up an institute of technical education in her memory. India’s economic problem, he declared “is not to be solved by a batch of Institutes or a cluster of Polytechnics”.

The answer then was to go outside the British Empire, to new technological powers like Germany and Japan but, above all, America where inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were developing new technologies and, practically, English was spoken.

Bassett records how Indian journals like Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Kesari (Marathi) and Mahratta (English) gave extensive coverage to technological developments in the West, often mentioning them in the context of MIT, which was a hub for innovation and learning.

MIT assiduously developed this image, not least as part of its long struggle to avoid being taken over by Harvard, the academic superpower next door. As part of this effort, it was keen to take international students, even appointing an alumnus, Jasper Whiting, in 1910 to extend MIT’s international influence.

Whiting focused on China and although he visited India, there is no record of what he did here. But other links were developing. MIT had already had its first Indian student by then in Keshav Bhat, who took courses there, in 1882-84 and again in 1890. His example helped advocates of technology overcome one of the biggest hurdles to Indians studying abroad — the caste censures against those who crossed the seas. Technological imperatives overruled caste concerns, though the travellers often had to go to great lengths to avoid problems like eating meat.

Devchand Parekh did visit the US and became a fervent advocate of US education. This was probably helped by the problems he faced getting a job in British India, which saw him returning to Kathiawar.

Native states could use their limited independence to support young Indians and with the help of Prabhashankar Pattani, dewan of Bhavnagar, Parekh was able to start a chemical industry (though his actual first venture was canning mango juice!).

Parekh used his position, and the monetary support of Bhavnagar, to help many young men study in the US, specifically at MIT. One example was Anant Pandya, who on returning to India had the usual problems getting work with British companies. He moved to London, where ironically he had better opportunities, and used the experience gained there to become a principal of the Bengal Engineering College in Sibpur.

When World War II forced the British to develop Indian industry to support the war effort, Pandya became deputy director of munitions production. In 1948 he became the first Indian general manager of Hindustan Aircraft, before returning to private practice. Tragically, he died in 1951 in a car accident, but his career showed a clear path for technocrats who embraced industrial development.

Parekh’s son-in-law TM Shah had a very different experience. He was a committed Gandhian who, after returning from MIT, took up a job with Tata Iron and Steel in Jamshedpur, only to run foul of the management when he organised a strike in support of the Congress’ Quit India resolution. Shah ended up in Hazaribagh jail for 18 months.

An extract of a letter from Bal Kalelkar to GD Birla (the edits were made by Gandhi)

The Westward ShiftPost Independence the prospects for MIT-trained engineers seemed great, especially with the launch of the massive infrastructure development of the Five-Year Plans. Yet the experience of those who got involved with these projects, like Minu Dastur, was mixed. Time and again, they found themselves sidelined by the international engineers brought in by the foreign governments sponsoring these projects. Even when Nehru advocated engineers like Dastur, bureaucracy would put up barriers.

This would be the repeated experience of others who tried working in India, so it comes as no surprise that many who went to MIT decided to stay in the US. Initially this was tough due to racist laws designed to keep out “Oriental” immigration to the US. Immediately after World War II, Indian students on American ships were attacked for taking the place of American soldiers who wanted to get home. And, as Bassett notes, MIT itself went through a period of privileging international students from Europe over Asia after World War II.

However, by the 1960s these policies started changing and other factors encouraged the Westward shift. One of the most basic was the American libraries originally set up in India in Calcutta (1943), Bombay (1944) and Delhi (1946) during World War II. These became sources of information about US college programmes and helped students make their way to the US. Another successful initiative that Bassett notes was a programme to get the children of senior Indian bureaucrats and business families to colleges like MIT.

MIT was also changing by then. Its earlier focus on manufacturing technology was giving way to the new world of information technology, and Indian students were eager to learn. But they couldn’t do this in India. In 1961, IIT-Bombay turned down a Soviet offer of a computer, “believing that the money could be better spent elsewhere”. When Calcutta Electric Supply bought a computer, workers gheraoed and forced it to be sold. TCS happily snapped it up, but it was the rare exception of an Indian company to believe in the potential of computers. For young Indians intent on being part of this revolution, the only way was West.

Gandhian TechWhere was Gandhi in all this? Most would see him abandoned in the rush for a technological future. But Bassett takes a cue from Bal Kalelkar, a young man who, remarkably, would go from walking with Gandhi on his Dandi March to studying in MIT and later working at Birla’s Texmaco company. Kalelkar never quite managed to match his Gandhian beliefs with the technological world he came to work in, yet he seems to have believed that Gandhi himself might have found a way.

Kalelkar wrote a memoir in which, Bassett writes, he “creates an image of Gandhi as an engineer of human souls”. More prosaically, Bassett notes Gandhi’s insistence on punctuality, enforced by the watch he carried all his life, and his fervour for quantification — of skeins of yarn spun, of exact amounts of food eaten, of his exact weight, all beliefs in the value of numbers to help govern and improve the world. This was the hallmark of an engineer and a suggestion that Gandhi was not as technophobic as he might seem.

Perhaps Gandhi was simply sceptical of technology pursued as an end in itself, but not of technology that really tried to find real solutions to the problems of India.

Towards the end of his book, Bassett notes the world of a few Indian MIT graduates like Almitra Patel, the first Indian woman to gain an engineering degree from MIT, who has now become a “garbage activist”, helping Indian cities find answers to solid waste disposal.

Or there is Deep Joshi who went to MIT on a scholarship, but got more interested in social issues like nutrition and poverty alleviation. In 2009 he won the Magsaysay Prize for his work. It is stories like theirs that show how the old dream of the technological Indian, now clearly achieved, might not just remain an accomplishment only in itself, but could really change India, in ways that even Gandhi could appreciate.

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As the Special Chief Secretary & IT Advisor to the Chief Minister - Govt. of Andhra Pradesh, J A Chowdary is all for chasing new growth horizons, pursuing radically different development approaches and outguessing technology trends that will shape the future.

As the Special Chief Secretary & IT Advisor to the Chief Minister - Govt. of Andhra Pradesh, J A Chowdary is all for chasing new growth horizons, pursuing radically different development approaches and outguessing technology trends that will shape the future.